Where do copyeditors come from? What makes people want to do this job? Many of us – the great majority, I would estimate – come to this as a second or subsequent career.
The best copyeditors have a lifelong love of weird facts, absorbing written material incessantly, keep an ear open for how language and usage is changing, and they have the ability to bring all the collected snippets to bear on the text.
They also like things to be right, insofar as it affects the reader, so the way the text appears on the page or screen doesn’t yank the reader out of the story the author has developed. I often say that my job is to stop the reader from going ‘Huh? What-now?’ at some infelicitous phrase, a discrepancy with what has gone before, or something simple like a spelling blunder.
That doesn’t mean imposing your ideas on the author – it’s more a sweeping away of distractions and providing a safety net for inadvertent goofs. A good copyeditor is invisible. They work to make the text shine as the author intended, and you should never see their lips move. You should never be able to tell where a copyeditor has trod.
So, what’s my own path to becoming a copyeditor?
Young Sue
While there’s a lot – an awful lot – more to copyediting than being able to spell, being able to spell is important. When my primary school reported to my parents that I was a ‘natural speller’, their hearts swelled with pride, I know.
I learned my life lessons along the way, as I wrote about several years ago – turn work in on time, be accurate and be pleasant about it – and I picked up a lot of transferable skills both for editing and for running my own business.
But throughout my salaried life, I was always the local wordsmith alongside the job I was hired to do, writing thumping great user manuals for staff and cogent information guides for the public, and editing or rewriting endless documents for my bosses and co-workers (‘This has been written by four people – make it sound like it was one person, in your spare time, would you, by tomorrow?’) and although I worked with numbers all the time, and was content to do so for the most part (there is something pleasingly unambiguous about numbers), my heart yearned for words.
Changing career to copyeditor
The time eventually came when it was clear I needed to get away from my last salaried job. Sure, I could have looked for new employment, but several things were going on and I decided to make the leap to becoming what I thought of back then as ‘a proofreader’ (ironically, it turned out that I really didn’t like proofreading, but loved copyediting, and it loved me).
And this is the point at which I start to tell wannabe editors to do as I say, not as I did!
I resigned from my job, thoroughly burned out, and took six months off before I got around to retraining and hanging out my shingle. I’d tell people now to do their initial training alongside working as before, if at all possible, or going part-time, and having a cushion of cash in the bank to help the transition from salaried to freelance and the less-regular income, especially if you don’t have ready-made contacts to hire you for your first jobs so you can build up experience, flesh out your CV and enable you to find other clients.
Still, it’s 17 years this month since I handed in my resignation, and now I’m an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, author of the Going Solo guide (free to CIEP members, available to buy on Amazon or from the Institute for everyone else) and the Flying Solo blog series, and on the Institute’s informal parliament of Wise Owls who also blog with advice, and I have a thriving business.
Making copyediting work
So – how did I get from out of work with no contacts and no training to where I am today?
In short: I trained. I joined the SfEP (forerunner of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading). I set up a website. (Meh, not as snappy as veni, vidi, vici, is it?)
I advertised and cold-emailed.
And it was a long, hard slog because I was doing things the hard way. I didn’t have contacts to approach. I brought one promise of substantial work with me into the freelance life but the job was delayed and delayed, and then withdrawn (due to their own budgetary constraints rather than their belief in my ability), which was a real blow.
But slowly, I started picking up more work. The SfEP, as it still was back then, was invaluable to me as a source of more and better training, of sources of work and the collegiality that supports us all as members. Through the SfEP I landed my first big repeat client, and things really started to move. Before Covid struck, I would be booked up perhaps four or six months ahead, a wonderfully comfortable place to be.
Covid took away a lot of my earnings, though – one huge client that provided nearly half my annual income took all the work back in-house; two other clients went to the wall. So it’s taken a bit of work to pick things up again, and I’m truly grateful to those clients who continued to provide a stream of interesting work and essential revenue. And it was a reminder not to defer marketing efforts just because you’re booked up!
Niching down
At the outset, I’d edit anything that people put in front of me, but I quickly discovered that I prefer the discipline of scholarly humanities and social sciences (I work on text that is going to be published – articles and books – not text that is going to be marked).
It’s intellectually challenging, I’m reading cutting-edge research and, in some cases, working on books that truly matter – like dealing with critical social problems via a handbook for social workers, or handling sexual murderers in the criminal justice system. I also get to work quite a bit with one of the loves of my life, William Shakespeare, and indulge in my partiality to a bit of history.
So one of the big attractions for me is the variety of subject matter, and the pleasure of knowing that my work makes for a better book. The mechanics of the scholarly apparatus do take an experienced copyeditor to ensure that the book works as a book, quite apart from what the text may have to say. In a great many projects, I may spend less than half my time overall actually reading and editing the running text: the rest goes on references, artwork (figures, tables, their captions and the illustrations list) and contents pages, plus heading levels, contributors’ biographies, appendices and cross-references.
This gives me satisfaction on two fronts: there’s the unambiguous right-or-wrong about the mechanics and the joy of turning a dog’s breakfast of a references list into a thing of beauty, and then there’s the more creative side of attending to the text and judging what can be left because it’s fine as it is, and what really does need intervention so the reader gets the right information in the right way.
This ‘niching down’ as editors call it (and, for all I know, every other freelancer ever) happens when you’ve found the thing you’re really good at, and people like to engage you to work on, and you can call on your expertise and experience. (For editorial newbies, once you niche down, your marketing gets easier, because you now know your target audience for your messaging.)
It’s possible to taking niching down too far, though – at that point you’ve made the pool of potential clients too small, and you’re at risk of becoming bored with the repetition. My focus on scholarly humanities and social sciences is pretty broad, excluding only the things I either have no interest in, or would be appalling at. Thus there is no risk of being bored. In the last month, I’ve worked on American law, eugenics, climate change and the social impacts of Covid, and I have some Shakespeare to start a few days after I publish this post.
So this is why I copyedit: it’s fascinating, it’s work that gives me a sense of achievement, it’s work I can do as a freelancer, and it satisfies the rational and the creative sides of my being.
If I sound like your kind of copyeditor, do please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you!
